Twitter Kills Auto-Translate Feature, Makes it Harder for You to Read Tweets

Twitter has quietly removed Bing translation from its mobile apps and web platform. The feature had first shown up in May in Tweetdeck, and was added to Twiiter's iOS and Android apps in June.There's been no announcement from Twitter to explain the change, but users have been commenting on the change for a few days now:

"Translate this tweet" is gone from Tweetdeck, making it harder for me to retweet non-US tweeters I follow

I don't know about you but I'm not surprised to see it go; this was a feature which was never going to work well. A 140 character tweet simply isn't long enough to provide enough context for an auto-translate function.(Sure, a person can do it, but we're talking computers here.)

An auto-translate feature works well with longer pieces of text: articles, press releases, and blog posts. It doesn't work so well with abbreviations, slang, text-speak, and other informal language.

I've never used the Bing Translation in Twitter, but a few years ago I helped beta test an independent project to offer a similar feature. That project was based on Google Translate, and not Bing, and it proved less than successful. I eventually gave up on it because so many of the tweets were unintelligible; too much of the context was lost in translation.

I do still translate the occasional tweet, but in my experience I have often had to ask for a second translation from an actual person before I was sure that I understood the tweet.

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Nate Hoffelder is the founder and editor of The Digital Reader:"I've been into reading ebooks since forever, but I only got my first ereader in July 2007. Everything quickly spiraled out of control from there. Before I started this blog in January 2010 I covered ebooks, ebook readers, and digital publishing for about 2 years as a part of MobileRead Forums. It's a great community, and being a member is a joy. But I thought I could make something out of how I covered the news for MobileRead, so I started this blog."

The strangest and creepiest thing happened as I was using translate before it was shut down. With all the conflicts going on now, many users were using Twitter to relay information to their followers and some would swap between English and their own language. I did notice, as I was following the updates on the current conflict in Gaza [must faster than the media updates], following those Palestinians who supposedly work in humanitarian roles, i.e. in hospitals, tweeting in Arabic and a couple of instances I used translate to read what they were writing, and the creepiest event unfolded when one of them tweeted about a rocket heading to a location in Israel. I thought I was hallucinating when I read it, but fifteen to twenty minutes later, the media was reporting about it as well and mentioned the same location. It made me shut down my Twitter account and altered my perspective on the Gaza situation with respect to the fact that rockets are being launched from certain hospitals. Since that day, or a day after, I noticed translate was nowhere to be found. I thought it was something wrong with my account. Obviously not. So I am now wondering if it’s a case of Twitter shutting translate down for other reasons.

I really liked the auto-translate feature. It was a good tool for easily increasing a foreign vocabulary, but it had big problems translating German to English, because it often could not deal with the German language’s important trailing verb. Typically this meant “without” & “not” was omitted, which radically changed the meaning of the statements and would be dangerous for anyone relying upon the veracity of the translation. It was amusing to people like me, who are looking to progress their language proficiency tweet by tweet and already understand the structural significance of German verb placement, so can check if it didn’t just turn the meaning of the statement on it’s head.

Google Translate has a similar problem. And yes, it is fun to check and see if the meaning of a sentence was reversed. What’s even funnier is that sometimes I don’t notice because there’s not enough context.

I used auto-translate a lot as I am learning Spanish and it’s a pain that it’s disappeared. Now I have to cut and paste into Google Translate. Thankfully, there are phone apps which have a translate feature.

Very sad to see the translate feature go. I used the translate feature all the time while following world events, especially in the Ukraine, Russia, and South America. Yes, the translations weren’t always perfect, but they were almost always good enough to give me the gist of what was said and for news articles from there I could decide if I wanted translate a linked news story.